If the ‘50s was not a shining moment in human history, the decade at least landed us with an abundance of game shows. Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Queen for a Day, and a few years later, Let’s Make a Deal. These were the four that played at our house, and I considered it daytime TV at its finest. How I became a game show aficionado puzzled me for years. Why wasn’t I in school or playing with my friends? These shows aired in the morning or early afternoon yet somehow I can picture myself, a little kid lounging on a rug the color of elephant skin, looking up at the small black-and-white box of the television while a man in a suit (the particular man depended on the particular show) called out with a booming voice that carried right into our New York City apartment.
The show I liked best was Queen for a Day. All that weeping and handwringing followed by forced smiles and fainting when the winner was chosen. Five days a week five down-on-their-luck ladies stood before the audience and told their tales of woe. Their husband had died or walked out on them, their money was gone, their kids were running wild in the streets. The winner was the woman whose story was deemed most heart wrenching, most pitiful. The audience was the judge by means of an applause meter and the queen was crowned right there on television and given, for her trouble, a new washer dryer.
My fascination with the heartbreak of others seems unseemly now. We’re in a heavy decade of heartbreak, wars springing up all over the globe, the climate calling for our attention and divisive leaders flexing their muscles. Every decade has its heartbreak, but if Earth had a say, if our planet had a built-in applause meter, this time, these present years, might win the crown and the washer dryer.
My parents lived through one world war and my grandparents lived through two. Even as I sat gawking at the television, entertained by the misfortune of five hapless housewives, the war in Vietnam was brewing, unseen but for all its causes inexorable. That was the war of my generation, the killing fields of young men my age. But its aftermath—the legless vets selling pencils on the street, the homeless vets curled up on benches in the park or on the steps of the church, lining up at the needle exchange—its aftermath (and after and after) continues, and will until we as a generation are gone. Because war no longer begins and ends. It’s no longer an accurate mark of misfortune’s reach. There isn’t a first shot fired, or last, or a treaty that isn’t signed with invisible ink. What’s set in motion is the prelude to the next undeclared round of suffering, after the confetti from the ticker-tape parade has been swept from the street.
And this is where the game shows come in. In that decade with the Second War behind us and our sights set on the next upward rung of the ladder, daytime TV was a novelty in itself. It’s tempting to look back at that time and see it now as the birthing ground of easy entertainment, enjoyable slices of make-believe life with make-believe stakes effective in dulling the mind. But perhaps there was another side to it. Perhaps what they were good for, those silly, salty “Door number one!” half-hours of human antics (especially Truth or Consequences which, if you haven’t seen it, is worth a look), what they were good for was understanding a shared plight and a shared desire for a woe-less life. How to get there was clear: Tell your story with tears; trust your luck and guess the right door behind which sits the new Camaro; accept defeat with grace and humor; don’t grumble if the other lady gets the crown.
My mother was a reader and rarely turned on the television except to watch the evening news. Not long after I left home, I asked her why I had such a clear memory of the various game shows that showed up on our long-ago black-and-white TV screen. Why was I watching Bob Barker sound the buzzer, and Mrs. Anonymous from Cleveland, Ohio win a washing machine when every other kid I knew was sitting in school, learning to read?
“Oh,” she said matter-of-factly. “That was the year you stayed home. You missed most of first grade. That was the year you had tuberculosis.”
I looked at her in astonishment, alarmed at the hole in my memory. It was strange how well I remembered what filled the hole—all those game shows, day after day, like the skip in a warped record.
Later I learned I was lucky. I’d contracted TB at a time when there was a cure. Instead of cloistering myself in a sanatorium, I took a pill and stayed home and watched a lifetime’s worth of other people’s luck or misery shrunk down to the size of a small TV screen. No wonder I was entranced. I was observing the different ways it could go when a mishap, a bacterium or a serendipitous moment touched us. The fortunate and star-crossed often looked the same. The winners cried, the losers laughed, and everyone clapped when out from behind door number three came the smelly old goat.
